Ep 36 Vivica Menegaz – Hormones, Keto, Healing Foods

Meet Vivica:

Vivica Menegaz is a certified whole-food nutritionist, blogger, published author and one of the leading voices advocating for a food-based approach to healing. Vivica was the first one to use the now popular expression “Keto Paleo” to describe her lifestyle and way of eating.

She is the founder of the “The Healing Foods Method’ – an 14 week online nutrition program where she works 1-on-1 with clients to turn their health around utilizing a therapeutic ketogenic diet for healing (keto paleo).

Tracing back to her Italian origins, Vivica is a passionate cook whose love of healing food has been shared with millions through her blog, “The Nourished Caveman.”

While living in Northern California, pursuing her self-sufficiency dreams and practice of nutrition, Vivica’s life came to a turning point when she discovered she was pre-diabetic. The nourishing Paleo foods she had been advocating we evidently not the whole solution to modern health problems. Fueled by this discovery, Vivica dove into research and found the ketogenic diet. It was love at the first bite.

Within the first couple of months, her blood glucose levels dropped, she shed excess weight, her brain fog cleared up and her energy levels skyrocketed. After a year of successful keto paleo lifestyle Vivica’s own health journey took another turn as she was now diagnosed with Hashimoto’s and Hypothyroidism. Again she had to rely on her studies and practical applications to resolve those challenges, and that is how she became the first holistic nutritionist to successfully utilize a ketogenic approach as the foundation to endocrine rebalancing.

Vivica’s therapeutic approach to food, lifestyle and supplementation, utilizes the healing power of foods and mindset, to address the incapacitating symptoms of many lifestyle-diseases that have plagued our modern lives.

She has made it her mission to help others reclaim their health and quality of life.

Vivica is also the author of 3 cookbooks: “The Ultimate Paleo Cookbook” 2015, together with 9 other bloggers, and “the big book of Fat Bombs” in 2016. Her latest book: “the Keto Paleo Kichen” was released in December 2017.

Show Notes:

ABOUT VIVICA

• I am working on my practice and learning how to help women
• I am specializing in hormones, so I always try to go deeper with that
• In the last year, I’ve been able to run proper lab tests on women, which is exciting because a lot of my clients come to me without proper testing especially for their thyroid
• There is so much more to be researched and understood about the way our thyroid works
• About 90% of my clients have thyroid problems or are on thyroid medication
• It’s very pervasive issue
• The thyroid is so misunderstood by so many practitioners and I feel like I need to step up and do something about it
• I kind of call myself a keto nutritionist, because I use the ketogenic diet – but it’s my own version of the ketogenic diet it is a more therapeutic version, for healing
• I have been a nutritionist for 7 years and have been specializing in keto for the last 5 years
• I also specialized in hormone rebalancing
• I am the author of 3 cookbooks
• I kind of had a real awakening moment when I was studying for my pre-nutrition courses, I discovered I was pre-diabetic
• I thought I was doing everything perfectly
• I was eating well, I was paleo, but the external signs were there
• I was gaining weight and couldn’t stop gaining weight
• I had really high inflammation and my body composition did not look good
• I saw how high my blood sugar levels were but I couldn’t understand why
• I was very insulin resistance and it took a long time to reset that, and that’s why I jumped into the ketogenic diet. I wanted to figure out how to lower insulin resistance through it
• At that time, there was not a lot of information about keto
• So, I jumped in with my both feet, because really, my well-being, survival and health depended on me making a change
• I immediately realized that the ketogenic diet made sense
• Knowing what keto does to the body, it just seemed like the most reasonable and logical way to start regulating my insulin through my food without having to depend on medication
• I am doctor-phobic, I don’t like doctors. I have not taken medication and I really do not want to
• I was very motivated in finding alternatives because I didn’t want go that route
• That really pushed me to the limits of my ability to find a solution for myself first and then for my clients, in a way that is holistic and natural
  
  
• Our minds decide on what’s good for us. And when you truly believe that something is going to do it for you, then it probably will
• Our minds have the power to make our body heal or become sick
• I feel like that is the number one determination
• At the same time, for myself, I also believe in ancestral diets and evolution
• I really do believe that we have evolved a certain way and our body is continuously evolving
• We kind of reached a point where our bodies have lost the ability to evolve with our food supply
• All of a sudden, about 100 years ago, there was this turn to industrial foods that are not really foods. They are chemicals, made in a lab, it’s all artificial
• That is why I am a big advocate against processed foods because I do not think that our body is able to recognize them fully
• And so, we lose the ability to digest and absorb nutrients and that’s why you see so much gut dysfunction these days, person after person
• One of the big factors is all of these chemicals in the processed foods that have destroyed our microbiome
• The gut influences most of our health because it is all connected
• The big foundation of my practice is detoxification, without it we can’t heal
• It’s more than just food, it can also be your environment
• I also feel like weight loss is one of the ways that we as women really destroy our health
• The attempts to override your body’s inability to lose weight in every possible and healthy way
• A good example is the people who do Keto
• The body has its own intelligence, the body is a beautiful and incredible, super complex machine that we just kept discovering more and more about
• But if the body is saying or doing something, there is usually a reason. That’s where we are severely uneducated
• Most conventional doctors will tell you that the diet has no impact in your health and mostly, they don’t consider toxicity and the accumulation of toxins because that is not part of what they have been taught
• For the last 20 years, there has been a strong movement about environmental toxins and food toxins and how they impact our bodies
• There is a thing called endocrine disruptors and estrogen mimickers that are a very big problem for women
• Not only do they end up unbalancing your whole endocrine system but, they also can cause a certain reaction
• What happens is that you get exposed to these toxins, they enter your body and your liver is desperately trying to keep up with the detoxification
• Because the exposure is so high combined with improper nutrient on the diet, chemicals in the environment and stress, that your liver can’t keep up
• So, it starts getting overloaded and congested and it just doesn’t know what to do with the toxins anymore
• So, it starts trying to store them away so it won’t kill you
• All these toxins are packed away in your fat and that is why your body keeps accumulating fat so that it can store away toxins
• When your liver and kidney pathways are congested, and there is no way for the toxins to go, they will be stored as fat
• The body does not let go of it because it is intelligence 
• This is why we have to detox, to get the toxins out
• The first step is always supporting the detoxification pathways
• You need to start changing your diet into a clean diet
• And we really need to look at our environment and start looking at all of the toxic chemicals that we are using on our skin, in our household or clothes
• At the same time, we support our body to release the body toxins
• It is a process, but it is a very possible process
• Using a saliva test to measure females hormones is really important because we can’t really see the active form of the hormones if we do a blood test 
• For cortisol, it is also be measured in a saliva test which can be done in one day
• But thyroid hormones are measured through a blood test
• There are a lot of different scenarios that need to be observed
• For me, weight is a symptom of disease
• There has been this great misunderstanding for the last 40 or 50 years that muscular issues are based on the consumption of fat
• When instead, most of the issues with your cardiovascular system come from over consumption of sugar and carbohydrates
• It is driven with excess carbs and sugar, and not by fat
• Fat it is not inflammatory, when sugar is always an inflammatory

WHAT IS NEXT FOR YOU

• I am just working on my practice, but I have been doing a lot of personal work on myself
• One of the things that I want to incorporate more into my practice is understanding the deeper root causes of disease
• For me, at this point, the deepest root causes are always emotional and energy
• Our minds and beliefs are so strong and powerful that they will influence the physical body to a great extent
• I have been pretty strict and knowledgeable about my own health, but then not being able to overcome certain issues like my hormones or stress
• That’s the kind of the work I have been excited about
• I want to move beyond strictly physiological, and be like a truly holistic perspective of how to help people navigate both things
• When you detox, it opens up places in your body where you have store toxins
• Toxins can also be like toxic thoughts or toxic emotions

HOW CAN PEOPLE FIND YOU

• Blog: thenourishedcaveman.com
• Instagram: thenourishedcaveman
• Facebook: The Nourished Caveman
• YouTube: Vivica Menegaz
• Pinterest: The Nourished Caveman
• Special page: thenourishedcaveman.com/podcast
• I have done saliva test for my hormones and MTHFR test for the mutation I suspected I had, so I did a DNA test
• And I regularly run my thyroid panels because I used to have Hashimoto’s and hypothyroid but that’s kind of cleared up now

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